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_ If the confession that I have often travelled from this Covent
Garden lodging of mine on Sundays, should give offence to those who
never travel on Sundays, they will be satisfied (I hope) by my
adding that the journeys in question were made to churches.
Not that I have any curiosity to hear powerful preachers. Time
was, when I was dragged by the hair of my head, as one may say, to
hear too many. On summer evenings, when every flower, and tree,
and bird, might have better addressed my soft young heart, I have
in my day been caught in the palm of a female hand by the crown,
have been violently scrubbed from the neck to the roots of the hair
as a purification for the Temple, and have then been carried off
highly charged with saponaceous electricity, to be steamed like a
potato in the unventilated breath of the powerful Boanerges Boiler
and his congregation, until what small mind I had, was quite
steamed out of me. In which pitiable plight I have been haled out
of the place of meeting, at the conclusion of the exercises, and
catechised respecting Boanerges Boiler, his fifthly, his sixthly,
and his seventhly, until I have regarded that reverend person in
the light of a most dismal and oppressive Charade. Time was, when
I was carried off to platform assemblages at which no human child,
whether of wrath or grace, could possibly keep its eyes open, and
when I felt the fatal sleep stealing, stealing over me, and when I
gradually heard the orator in possession, spinning and humming like
a great top, until he rolled, collapsed, and tumbled over, and I
discovered to my burning shame and fear, that as to that last stage
it was not he, but I. I have sat under Boanerges when he has
specifically addressed himself to us--us, the infants--and at this
present writing I hear his lumbering jocularity (which never amused
us, though we basely pretended that it did), and I behold his big
round face, and I look up the inside of his outstretched coat-
sleeve as if it were a telescope with the stopper on, and I hate
him with an unwholesome hatred for two hours. Through such means
did it come to pass that I knew the powerful preacher from
beginning to end, all over and all through, while I was very young,
and that I left him behind at an early period of life. Peace be
with him! More peace than he brought to me!
Now, I have heard many preachers since that time--not powerful;
merely Christian, unaffected, and reverential--and I have had many
such preachers on my roll of friends. But, it was not to hear
these, any more than the powerful class, that I made my Sunday
journeys. They were journeys of curiosity to the numerous churches
in the City of London. It came into my head one day, here had I
been cultivating a familiarity with all the churches of Rome, and I
knew nothing of the insides of the old churches of London! This
befell on a Sunday morning. I began my expeditions that very same
day, and they lasted me a year.
I never wanted to know the names of the churches to which I went,
and to this hour I am profoundly ignorant in that particular of at
least nine-tenths of them. Indeed, saying that I know the church
of old GOWER'S tomb (he lies in effigy with his head upon his
books) to be the church of Saint Saviour's, Southwark; and the
church of MILTON'S tomb to be the church of Cripplegate; and the
church on Cornhill with the great golden keys to be the church of
Saint Peter; I doubt if I could pass a competitive examination in
any of the names. No question did I ever ask of living creature
concerning these churches, and no answer to any antiquarian
question on the subject that I ever put to books, shall harass the
reader's soul. A full half of my pleasure in them arose out of
their mystery; mysterious I found them; mysterious they shall
remain for me.
Where shall I begin my round of hidden and forgotten old churches
in the City of London?
It is twenty minutes short of eleven on a Sunday morning, when I
stroll down one of the many narrow hilly streets in the City that
tend due south to the Thames. It is my first experiment, and I
have come to the region of Whittington in an omnibus, and we have
put down a fierce-eyed, spare old woman, whose slate-coloured gown
smells of herbs, and who walked up Aldersgate-street to some chapel
where she comforts herself with brimstone doctrine, I warrant. We
have also put down a stouter and sweeter old lady, with a pretty
large prayer-book in an unfolded pocket-handkerchief, who got out
at a corner of a court near Stationers' Hall, and who I think must
go to church there, because she is the widow of some deceased old
Company's Beadle. The rest of our freight were mere chance
pleasure-seekers and rural walkers, and went on to the Blackwall
railway. So many bells are ringing, when I stand undecided at a
street corner, that every sheep in the ecclesiastical fold might be
a bell-wether. The discordance is fearful. My state of indecision
is referable to, and about equally divisible among, four great
churches, which are all within sight and sound, all within the
space of a few square yards.
As I stand at the street corner, I don't see as many as four people
at once going to church, though I see as many as four churches with
their steeples clamouring for people. I choose my church, and go
up the flight of steps to the great entrance in the tower. A
mouldy tower within, and like a neglected washhouse. A rope comes
through the beamed roof, and a man in the corner pulls it and
clashes the bell--a whity-brown man, whose clothes were once black-
-a man with flue on him, and cobweb. He stares at me, wondering
how I come there, and I stare at him, wondering how he comes there.
Through a screen of wood and glass, I peep into the dim church.
About twenty people are discernible, waiting to begin. Christening
would seem to have faded out of this church long ago, for the font
has the dust of desuetude thick upon it, and its wooden cover
(shaped like an old-fashioned tureen-cover) looks as if it wouldn't
come off, upon requirement. I perceive the altar to be rickety and
the Commandments damp. Entering after this survey, I jostle the
clergyman in his canonicals, who is entering too from a dark lane
behind a pew of state with curtains, where nobody sits. The pew is
ornamented with four blue wands, once carried by four somebodys, I
suppose, before somebody else, but which there is nobody now to
hold or receive honour from. I open the door of a family pew, and
shut myself in; if I could occupy twenty family pews at once I
might have them. The clerk, a brisk young man (how does HE come
here?), glances at me knowingly, as who should say, 'You have done
it now; you must stop.' Organ plays. Organ-loft is in a small
gallery across the church; gallery congregation, two girls. I
wonder within myself what will happen when we are required to sing.
There is a pale heap of books in the corner of my pew, and while
the organ, which is hoarse and sleepy, plays in such fashion that I
can hear more of the rusty working of the stops than of any music,
I look at the books, which are mostly bound in faded baize and
stuff. They belonged in 1754, to the Dowgate family; and who were
they? Jane Comport must have married Young Dowgate, and come into
the family that way; Young Dowgate was courting Jane Comport when
he gave her her prayer-book, and recorded the presentation in the
fly-leaf; if Jane were fond of Young Dowgate, why did she die and
leave the book here? Perhaps at the rickety altar, and before the
damp Commandments, she, Comport, had taken him, Dowgate, in a flush
of youthful hope and joy, and perhaps it had not turned out in the
long run as great a success as was expected?
The opening of the service recalls my wandering thoughts. I then
find, to my astonishment, that I have been, and still am, taking a
strong kind of invisible snuff, up my nose, into my eyes, and down
my throat. I wink, sneeze, and cough. The clerk sneezes; the
clergyman winks; the unseen organist sneezes and coughs (and
probably winks); all our little party wink, sneeze, and cough. The
snuff seems to be made of the decay of matting, wood, cloth, stone,
iron, earth, and something else. Is the something else, the decay
of dead citizens in the vaults below? As sure as Death it is! Not
only in the cold, damp February day, do we cough and sneeze dead
citizens, all through the service, but dead citizens have got into
the very bellows of the organ, and half choked the same. We stamp
our feet to warm them, and dead citizens arise in heavy clouds.
Dead citizens stick upon the walls, and lie pulverised on the
sounding-board over the clergyman's head, and, when a gust of air
comes, tumble down upon him.
In this first experience I was so nauseated by too much snuff, made
of the Dowgate family, the Comport branch, and other families and
branches, that I gave but little heed to our dull manner of ambling
through the service; to the brisk clerk's manner of encouraging us
to try a note or two at psalm time; to the gallery-congregation's
manner of enjoying a shrill duet, without a notion of time or tune;
to the whity-brown man's manner of shutting the minister into the
pulpit, and being very particular with the lock of the door, as if
he were a dangerous animal. But, I tried again next Sunday, and
soon accustomed myself to the dead citizens when I found that I
could not possibly get on without them among the City churches.
Another Sunday.
After being again rung for by conflicting bells, like a leg of
mutton or a laced hat a hundred years ago, I make selection of a
church oddly put away in a corner among a number of lanes--a
smaller church than the last, and an ugly: of about the date of
Queen Anne. As a congregation, we are fourteen strong: not
counting an exhausted charity school in a gallery, which has
dwindled away to four boys, and two girls. In the porch, is a
benefaction of loaves of bread, which there would seem to be nobody
left in the exhausted congregation to claim, and which I saw an
exhausted beadle, long faded out of uniform, eating with his eyes
for self and family when I passed in. There is also an exhausted
clerk in a brown wig, and two or three exhausted doors and windows
have been bricked up, and the service books are musty, and the
pulpit cushions are threadbare, and the whole of the church
furniture is in a very advanced stage of exhaustion. We are three
old women (habitual), two young lovers (accidental), two tradesmen,
one with a wife and one alone, an aunt and nephew, again two girls
(these two girls dressed out for church with everything about them
limp that should be stiff, and vice versa, are an invariable
experience), and three sniggering boys. The clergyman is, perhaps,
the chaplain of a civic company; he has the moist and vinous look,
and eke the bulbous boots, of one acquainted with 'Twenty port, and
comet vintages.
We are so quiet in our dulness that the three sniggering boys, who
have got away into a corner by the altar-railing, give us a start,
like crackers, whenever they laugh. And this reminds me of my own
village church where, during sermon-time on bright Sundays when the
birds are very musical indeed, farmers' boys patter out over the
stone pavement, and the clerk steps out from his desk after them,
and is distinctly heard in the summer repose to pursue and punch
them in the churchyard, and is seen to return with a meditative
countenance, making believe that nothing of the sort has happened.
The aunt and nephew in this City church are much disturbed by the
sniggering boys. The nephew is himself a boy, and the sniggerers
tempt him to secular thoughts of marbles and string, by secretly
offering such commodities to his distant contemplation. This young
Saint Anthony for a while resists, but presently becomes a
backslider, and in dumb show defies the sniggerers to 'heave' a
marble or two in his direction. Here in he is detected by the aunt
(a rigorous reduced gentlewoman who has the charge of offices), and
I perceive that worthy relative to poke him in the side, with the
corrugated hooked handle of an ancient umbrella. The nephew
revenges himself for this, by holding his breath and terrifying his
kinswoman with the dread belief that he has made up his mind to
burst. Regardless of whispers and shakes, he swells and becomes
discoloured, and yet again swells and becomes discoloured, until
the aunt can bear it no longer, but leads him out, with no visible
neck, and with his eyes going before him like a prawn's. This
causes the sniggerers to regard flight as an eligible move, and I
know which of them will go out first, because of the over-devout
attention that he suddenly concentrates on the clergyman. In a
little while, this hypocrite, with an elaborate demonstration of
hushing his footsteps, and with a face generally expressive of
having until now forgotten a religious appointment elsewhere, is
gone. Number two gets out in the same way, but rather quicker.
Number three getting safely to the door, there turns reckless, and
banging it open, flies forth with a Whoop! that vibrates to the top
of the tower above us.
The clergyman, who is of a prandial presence and a muffled voice,
may be scant of hearing as well as of breath, but he only glances
up, as having an idea that somebody has said Amen in a wrong place,
and continues his steady jog-trot, like a farmer's wife going to
market. He does all he has to do, in the same easy way, and gives
us a concise sermon, still like the jog-trot of the farmer's wife
on a level road. Its drowsy cadence soon lulls the three old women
asleep, and the unmarried tradesman sits looking out at window, and
the married tradesman sits looking at his wife's bonnet, and the
lovers sit looking at one another, so superlatively happy, that I
mind when I, turned of eighteen, went with my Angelica to a City
church on account of a shower (by this special coincidence that it
was in Huggin-lane), and when I said to my Angelica, 'Let the
blessed event, Angelica, occur at no altar but this!' and when my
Angelica consented that it should occur at no other--which it
certainly never did, for it never occurred anywhere. And O,
Angelica, what has become of you, this present Sunday morning when
I can't attend to the sermon; and, more difficult question than
that, what has become of Me as I was when I sat by your side!
But, we receive the signal to make that unanimous dive which surely
is a little conventional--like the strange rustlings and settlings
and clearings of throats and noses, which are never dispensed with,
at certain points of the Church service, and are never held to be
necessary under any other circumstances. In a minute more it is
all over, and the organ expresses itself to be as glad of it as it
can be of anything in its rheumatic state, and in another minute we
are all of us out of the church, and Whity-brown has locked it up.
Another minute or little more, and, in the neighbouring churchyard-
-not the yard of that church, but of another--a churchyard like a
great shabby old mignonette box, with two trees in it and one tomb-
-I meet Whity-brown, in his private capacity, fetching a pint of
beer for his dinner from the public-house in the corner, where the
keys of the rotting fire-ladders are kept and were never asked for,
and where there is a ragged, white-seamed, out-at-elbowed bagatelle
board on the first floor.
In one of these City churches, and only in one, I found an
individual who might have been claimed as expressly a City
personage. I remember the church, by the feature that the
clergyman couldn't get to his own desk without going through the
clerk's, or couldn't get to the pulpit without going through the
reading-desk--I forget which, and it is no matter--and by the
presence of this personage among the exceedingly sparse
congregation. I doubt if we were a dozen, and we had no exhausted
charity school to help us out. The personage was dressed in black
of square cut, and was stricken in years, and wore a black velvet
cap, and cloth shoes. He was of a staid, wealthy, and dissatisfied
aspect. In his hand, he conducted to church a mysterious child: a
child of the feminine gender. The child had a beaver hat, with a
stiff drab plume that surely never belonged to any bird of the air.
The child was further attired in a nankeen frock and spencer, brown
boxing-gloves, and a veil. It had a blemish, in the nature of
currant jelly, on its chin; and was a thirsty child. Insomuch that
the personage carried in his pocket a green bottle, from which,
when the first psalm was given out, the child was openly refreshed.
At all other times throughout the service it was motionless, and
stood on the seat of the large pew, closely fitted into the corner,
like a rain-water pipe.
The personage never opened his book, and never looked at the
clergyman. He never sat down either, but stood with his arms
leaning on the top of the pew, and his forehead sometimes shaded
with his right hand, always looking at the church door. It was a
long church for a church of its size, and he was at the upper end,
but he always looked at the door. That he was an old bookkeeper,
or an old trader who had kept his own books, and that he might be
seen at the Bank of England about Dividend times, no doubt. That
he had lived in the City all his life and was disdainful of other
localities, no doubt. Why he looked at the door, I never
absolutely proved, but it is my belief that he lived in expectation
of the time when the citizens would come back to live in the City,
and its ancient glories would be renewed. He appeared to expect
that this would occur on a Sunday, and that the wanderers would
first appear, in the deserted churches, penitent and humbled.
Hence, he looked at the door which they never darkened. Whose
child the child was, whether the child of a disinherited daughter,
or some parish orphan whom the personage had adopted, there was
nothing to lead up to. It never played, or skipped, or smiled.
Once, the idea occurred to me that it was an automaton, and that
the personage had made it; but following the strange couple out one
Sunday, I heard the personage say to it, 'Thirteen thousand
pounds;' to which it added in a weak human voice, 'Seventeen and
fourpence.' Four Sundays I followed them out, and this is all I
ever heard or saw them say. One Sunday, I followed them home.
They lived behind a pump, and the personage opened their abode with
an exceeding large key. The one solitary inscription on their
house related to a fire-plug. The house was partly undermined by a
deserted and closed gateway; its windows were blind with dirt; and
it stood with its face disconsolately turned to a wall. Five great
churches and two small ones rang their Sunday bells between this
house and the church the couple frequented, so they must have had
some special reason for going a quarter of a mile to it. The last
time I saw them, was on this wise. I had been to explore another
church at a distance, and happened to pass the church they
frequented, at about two of the afternoon when that edifice was
closed. But, a little side-door, which I had never observed
before, stood open, and disclosed certain cellarous steps.
Methought 'They are airing the vaults to-day,' when the personage
and the child silently arrived at the steps, and silently
descended. Of course, I came to the conclusion that the personage
had at last despaired of the looked-for return of the penitent
citizens, and that he and the child went down to get themselves
buried.
In the course of my pilgrimages I came upon one obscure church
which had broken out in the melodramatic style, and was got up with
various tawdry decorations, much after the manner of the extinct
London may-poles. These attractions had induced several young
priests or deacons in black bibs for waistcoats, and several young
ladies interested in that holy order (the proportion being, as I
estimated, seventeen young ladies to a deacon), to come into the
City as a new and odd excitement. It was wonderful to see how
these young people played out their little play in the heart of the
City, all among themselves, without the deserted City's knowing
anything about it. It was as if you should take an empty counting-
house on a Sunday, and act one of the old Mysteries there. They
had impressed a small school (from what neighbourhood I don't know)
to assist in the performances, and it was pleasant to notice
frantic garlands of inscription on the walls, especially addressing
those poor innocents in characters impossible for them to decipher.
There was a remarkably agreeable smell of pomatum in this
congregation.
But, in other cases, rot and mildew and dead citizens formed the
uppermost scent, while, infused into it in a dreamy way not at all
displeasing, was the staple character of the neighbourhood. In the
churches about Mark-lane, for example, there was a dry whiff of
wheat; and I accidentally struck an airy sample of barley out of an
aged hassock in one of them. From Rood-lane to Tower-street, and
thereabouts, there was often a subtle flavour of wine: sometimes,
of tea. One church near Mincing-lane smelt like a druggist's
drawer. Behind the Monument the service had a flavour of damaged
oranges, which, a little further down towards the river, tempered
into herrings, and gradually toned into a cosmopolitan blast of
fish. In one church, the exact counterpart of the church in the
Rake's Progress where the hero is being married to the horrible old
lady, there was no speciality of atmosphere, until the organ shook
a perfume of hides all over us from some adjacent warehouse.
Be the scent what it would, however, there was no speciality in the
people. There were never enough of them to represent any calling
or neighbourhood. They had all gone elsewhere over-night, and the
few stragglers in the many churches languished there
inexpressively.
Among the Uncommercial travels in which I have engaged, this year
of Sunday travel occupies its own place, apart from all the rest.
Whether I think of the church where the sails of the oyster-boats
in the river almost flapped against the windows, or of the church
where the railroad made the bells hum as the train rushed by above
the roof, I recall a curious experience. On summer Sundays, in the
gentle rain or the bright sunshine--either, deepening the idleness
of the idle City--I have sat, in that singular silence which
belongs to resting-places usually astir, in scores of buildings at
the heart of the world's metropolis, unknown to far greater numbers
of people speaking the English tongue, than the ancient edifices of
the Eternal City, or the Pyramids of Egypt. The dark vestries and
registries into which I have peeped, and the little hemmed-in
churchyards that have echoed to my feet, have left impressions on
my memory as distinct and quaint as any it has in that way
received. In all those dusty registers that the worms are eating,
there is not a line but made some hearts leap, or some tears flow,
in their day. Still and dry now, still and dry! and the old tree
at the window with no room for its branches, has seen them all out.
So with the tomb of the old Master of the old Company, on which it
drips. His son restored it and died, his daughter restored it and
died, and then he had been remembered long enough, and the tree
took possession of him, and his name cracked out.
There are few more striking indications of the changes of manners
and customs that two or three hundred years have brought about,
than these deserted churches. Many of them are handsome and costly
structures, several of them were designed by WREN, many of them
arose from the ashes of the great fire, others of them outlived the
plague and the fire too, to die a slow death in these later days.
No one can be sure of the coming time; but it is not too much to
say of it that it has no sign in its outsetting tides, of the
reflux to these churches of their congregations and uses. They
remain like the tombs of the old citizens who lie beneath them and
around them, Monuments of another age. They are worth a Sunday-
exploration, now and then, for they yet echo, not unharmoniously,
to the time when the City of London really was London; when the
'Prentices and Trained Bands were of mark in the state; when even
the Lord Mayor himself was a Reality--not a Fiction conventionally
be-puffed on one day in the year by illustrious friends, who no
less conventionally laugh at him on the remaining three hundred and
sixty-four days. _
Read next: CHAPTER X - SHY NEIGHBOURHOODS
Read previous: CHAPTER VIII - THE GREAT TASMANIA'S CARGO
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